My guest this week is Risto Miikkulainen, professor of computer science at UT-Austin and vice president of Research at Sentient Technologies. Risto came locked and loaded to discuss a topic that we’ve received a ton of requests for — evolutionary algorithms.

During our talk we discuss some of the things Sentient is working on in the financial services and retail fields, and we dig into the technology behind it, evolutionary algorithms, which is also the focus of Risto’s research at UT. I really enjoyed this interview and learned a ton, and I’m sure you will too.

TWiML Online Meetup

The upcoming TWiML Online Meetup, which will be held tomorrow, 9/12 at 3pm PT. The discussion will be lead by Nikola Kučerová, who will be presenting “Learning Long-Term Dependencies with Gradient Descent is Difficult”, by Yoshua Bengio & company. Of course, it’s best if you’ve taken a look at the paper in advance, but even if not, you’re sure to learn something from the discussion. For more information or to register, visit twimlai.com/meetup.

Thanks to Our Sponsor

Thank you to our friends at Cloudera for sponsoring this episode. Yes, they are the Hadoop company, but did you know they also offer software for data science and deep learning? The idea is pretty simple: If you work for a large enterprise you probably already have Hadoop in place, and your Hadoop cluster is filled with lots of data that you want to use in building your models. But you still need to easily access that data, process it using the latest open source tools and harness bursts of compute power to train your models. This is where Cloudera’s Data Science Workbench comes in. With Data Science Workbench, Cloudera can help you get up and running with deep learning without massive new investments, by implementing an on-demand self-service deep learning platform on existing CDH clusters.

The folks at Cloudera are so confident that you’re going to like what you see, that for a limited time, they’re offering a drone to qualified participants, simply for meeting with their sales representative for a demonstration of Cloudera’s Data Science Workbench.

The Artificial Intelligence Conference

I’ll be in SF September 18-20 for the Artificial Intelligence Conference, and hope to see you there too! If you’ve already registered, send me a shout on twitter and let me know! If you are still interested in coming, but haven’t registered just yet, use code PCTWIML, it’s good for 20% off of most conference packages!

Mentioned in the Interview

3 comments

Excellent show. Another fun interview. As with most of your guests, they are working on a lot of projects. Risto mentioned a Java-based toolkit produced by GMU (George Mason University). I was hoping you might have more info on that toolkit